What if Walt Disney was the producer of Looney Tunes/Walt Disney Animated Classics/Pinocchio
Pinocchio is a 1940 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the Italian children's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It was the third animated feature film produced by Disney, made after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). The plot of the film involves an old wood-carver named Geppetto who carves a wooden puppet named Pinocchio. The puppet is brought to life by a blue fairy, who informs him that he can become a real boy if he proves himself to be "brave, truthful, and unselfish". Pinocchio's efforts to become a real boy involve encounters with a host of unsavory characters. The film was adapted by Aurelius Battaglia, William Cottrell, Otto Englander, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears, and Webb Smith from Collodi's book. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, and the film's sequences were directed by Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, and Bill Roberts. Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, giving realistic movement to vehicles, machinery and natural elements such as rain, lightning, smoke, shadows and water. The film was released to theaters by RKO Radio Pictures on February 7, 1940. It was a critical and commercial success during its initial release. The popularity of the film has led to it being re-released theatrically many times, until its home video release in the 1980s, and the film's main antagonist, Honest John being integrated into Disney's well-known short series Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Critical analysis of Pinocchio identifies it as a simple morality tale that teaches children of the benefits of hard work and middle-class values. Plot Jiminy Cricket explains that he is going to tell a story of a wish coming true. His story begins in the workshop of a woodworker named Geppetto. Jiminy watches as Geppetto finishes work on a wooden marionette whom he names Pinocchio. Before falling asleep, Geppetto makes a wish on a star that Pinocchio be a real boy. During the night, a Blue Fairy visits the workshop and brings Pinocchio to life, although he still remains a puppet. She informs him that if he proves himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, he will become a real boy, and assigns Jiminy to be his conscience. Geppetto discovers that his wish has come true, and is filled with joy. However, on his way to school, Pinocchio is led astray by an conman fox named Honest John the Fox and his companion, Gideon the Cat, who convince him to join a puppet show, despite Jiminy's objections. Pinocchio becomes the puppet show's star attraction as a marionette who can sing and dance without strings. However, when Pinocchio wants to go home for the night, Stromboli, the theater's greedy owner, locks him in a birdcage. Jiminy arrives to see Pinocchio, and is unable to free him. The Blue Fairy appears, and asks Pinocchio why he was not at school. Jiminy urges Pinocchio to tell the truth, but instead he starts telling lies, which causes his nose to grow longer and longer. Pinocchio vows to be good from now on, and the Blue Fairy returns his nose to its original form and sets him free, while warning him that this will be the last time she can help him. As Pinocchio travels home, he meets Honest John and Gideon again. This time, Honest John, after seeing five gold pieces Stromboli had given to Pinocchio before locking him, convinces Pinocchio that if he plants his coins in the Field of Miracles outside an town named Catchfools, they will grow into a tree with gold coins. While Pinocchio travels to said field, despite Jiminy's objections, Honest John takes off ahead of Pinocchio and disguises himself as a bandit while Pinocchio continues on toward Catchfools, despite Jiminy's warnings. The disguised Honest John ambushes Pinocchio, but the puppet escapes to a white house, but he is caught and almost prepared to be hanged in a tree, but is rescued by an owl. When Pinocchio heads out to meet his father, he once again encounters Honest John and Gideon. They remind the puppet of the Field of Miracles, and finally, he agrees to go with them and plant his gold. They finally reach Catchfools, where every animal in town has done something exceedingly foolish and now suffers as a result. Upon reaching the Field of Miracles, Pinocchio buries his coins and then leaves for the twenty minutes that it will take for his gold to grow into gold coin trees. After Pinocchio leaves, Honest John digs up the coins and runs away. Once Pinocchio returns, he learns of the treachery from a parrot. Returning to the Owl's house, Pinocchio discovers he had forgotten his father and returns to the village to find him. Meanwhile, across town, Honest John meets a Coachman who promises to pay him money if he can find naughty kids for him to take to Pleasure Island. Encountering Pinocchio on his way home, he and Gideon convince him that he needs to take a vacation there. On the way to Pleasure Island, he befriends Lampwick, a delinquent boy. Without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Pinocchio and the other boys soon engage in smoking tobacco, gambling, vandalism, and getting drunk, much to Jiminy's dismay. Later, while trying to get home, Jiminy discovers that the island hides a horrible curse: the boys and girls brought to Pleasure Island are transformed into donkeys and sold into slave labor. Jiminy runs back to warn Pinocchio, only to discover that Lampwick has transformed into a donkey. The Owl, who saw Pinocchio going to Pleasure Island, comes and battles the Coachman, who then falls to a waterfall, where he gets chased by cocodriles. During the fight, Pinocchio manages to escape, only partially transformed. Upon returning home, Pinocchio and Jiminy find the workshop vacant. They soon get a letter from the blue fairy as a dove, stating that Geppetto had ventured out in search of Pinocchio, but was swallowed by a giant sperm whale named Monstro, and is now living in his belly. He also sees Honest John and Gideon, who were arrested by a police officer, who tells him authorities had also caught the Coachman, in a passing paddy wagon. They beg Pinocchio to vouch for them whereupon Pinocchio tells the police officer that Honest John stole his coins and tricked him into go to Pleasure Island. The police officer then drives the paddy wagon away stating that what Honest John did to Pinocchio will be the result of a long prison sentence, making Honest John swearing revenge at Pinocchio, while beating Gideon up. Pinocchio jumps into the sea accompanied by Jiminy and the Owl. Pinocchio is soon swallowed by Monstro as well, where he is reunited with Geppetto. Pinocchio devises a scheme to make Monstro sneeze, giving them a chance to escape. The scheme works, but the enraged whale chases them, and smashes their raft. Pinocchio pulls Geppetto to safety in a cave before Monstro crashes into it. They are all washed up on a beach on the other side. Geppetto, Jiminy and the Owl survive, but Pinocchio lies motionless face down in a tide pool nearby. Back home, the group mourns him. The Blue Fairy, however, decides that Pinocchio has proven himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, that he is reborn as a real human boy (his donkey ears and tail also gone), and everyone celebrates. Jiminy steps outside to thank the Fairy, and is rewarded with a solid gold badge that certifies him as an official conscience. Cast * Dickie Jones as Pinocchio * Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket * Christian Rub as Mister Geppetto * Walter Catlett as "Honest" John Worthington Foulfellow * Mel Blanc as Gideon the Cat, Mr. Owl * Charles Judels as Stromboli, the Coachman * Evelyn Venable as The Blue Fairy * Frankie Darro as Lampwick Production Development In September 1937, during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animator Norman Ferguson brought a translated version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian children's novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio to the attention of Walt Disney. After reading the book "Walt was busting his guts with enthusiasm" as Ferguson later recalled. Pinocchio was intended to be the studio's third film, after Bambi. However, due to difficulties with Bambi (adapting the story and animating the animals realistically), it was put on hold and Pinocchio was moved ahead in production. Writing and design Unlike Snow White, which was a short story that the writers could expand and experiment with, Pinocchio was based on a novel with a very fixed story. Therefore, the story went through drastic changes before reaching its final incarnation.46 In the original novel, Pinocchio is a cold, rude, ungrateful, inhuman creature that often repels sympathy and only learns his lessons by means of brutal torture.6 The writers decided to modernize the character and depict him similar to Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy, but equally as rambunctious as the puppet in the book.4 The story was still being developed in the early stages of animation. Early scenes animated by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas show that Pinocchio's design was exactly like that of a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap and bare wooden hands. Early scenes animated by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston show that Pinocchio's design was exactly like that of a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap and bare wooden hands. Walt Disney, however, was not pleased with the work that was being done on the film. He felt that no one could really sympathize with such a character and called for an immediate halt in production. Fred Moore redesigned the character slightly to make him more appealing but the design still retained a wooden feel. Young and upcoming animator Milt Kahl felt that Thomas, Johnston and Moore were "rather obsessed with the idea of this boy being a wooden puppet" and felt that they should "forget that he was a puppet and get a cute little boy; you can always draw the wooden joints and make him a wooden puppet afterwards". Hamilton Luske suggested to Kahl that he should demonstrate his beliefs by animating a test sequence. Kahl showed Disney a test scene in which Pinocchio is underwater looking for his father. From this scene Kahl re-envisioned the character by making him look more like a real boy, with a child's Tyrolean hat and standard cartoon character four-fingered (or three and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. The only parts of Pinocchio that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms, legs and his little button wooden nose. Disney embraced Kahl's scene and immediately urged the writers to evolve Pinocchio into a more innocent, naïve, somewhat coy personality that reflected Kahl's design. However, Disney found that the new Pinocchio was too helpless and was far too often led astray by deceiving characters. Therefore, in the summer of 1938 Disney and his story team established the character of the cricket. Originally the cricket was only a minor character that Pinocchio killed by squashing him with a mallet and that later returned as a ghost. Disney dubbed the cricket Jiminy, and made him into a character that would try to guide Pinocchio into the right decisions. Once the character was expanded, he was depicted as a realistic cricket with toothed legs and waving antennae, but Disney wanted something more likable. Ward Kimball had spent several months animating a "Soup Eating Sequence" in Snow White, which was cut from the film due to pacing reasons. Kimball was about to quit until Disney rewarded him for his work by promoting him to the supervising animator of Jiminy Cricket. Kimball conjured up the design for Jiminy Cricket, whom he described as a little man with an egg head and no ears. "The only thing that makes him a cricket is because we call him one," Kimball later joked. Casting Due to the huge successes of Snow White and Wizard of Oz, Walt Disney wanted more famous voices for Pinocchio, which marked the first time an animated film had used celebrities as voice actors. He cast popular singer Cliff Edwards, also known as "Ukelele Ike", as Jiminy Cricket. Disney rejected the idea of having an adult play Pinocchio and insisted that the character be voiced by a real child. He cast 12-year-old child actor Dickie Jones, who had previously been in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He also cast Frankie Darro as Lampwick, Walter Catlett as the villainous Honest John Foulfellow the Fox, Evelyn Venable as the Blue Fairy, Charles Judels as both the greedy theater owner Stromboli and Honest John's boss, the Coachman, and Christian Rub as Geppetto, whose design was even a caricature of Rub. Another voice actor recruited was Mel Blanc, best remembered for voicing many of the characters in Warner Bros. cartoon shorts. Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, it was eventually decided that Gideon would be mute, so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was subsequently deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film. Animation Animation began in September 1938. During the production of the film, the character model department was headed by Joe Grant, whose department was responsible for the building of three-dimensional clay models of the characters in the film, known as maquettes. These models were then given to the staff to observe how a character should be drawn from any given angle desired by the artists. The model makers also built working models of Geppetto's cuckoo clocks, as well as Stromboli's gypsy wagon and the Coachman's carriage. However, owing to the difficulty animating a realistic moving vehicle, the artists filmed the carriage maquettes on a miniature set using stop motion animation. Then each frame of the animation was transferred onto animation cels using an early version of a Xerox. The cels were then painted on the back and overlaid on top of background images with the cels of the characters to create the completed shot on the rostrum camera. Like Snow White, live-action footage was shot for Pinocchio with the actors playing the scenes in pantomime, supervised by Hamilton Luske. Rather than tracing, which would result in stiff unnatural movement, the animators used the footage as a guide for animation by studying human movement and then incorporating some poses into the animation (though slightly exaggerated). Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation. In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters. This includes vehicles, machinery and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water, as well as the fantasy or science-fiction type effects like Fairy Dust. The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, who mainly worked on Fantasia contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand. Effects animator Sandy Strother kept a diary about his year-long animation of the water effects, which included splashes, ripples, bubbles, waves and the illusion of being underwater. To help give depth to the ocean, the animators put more detail into the waves on the water surface in the foreground, and put in less detail as the surface moved further back. After the animation was traced onto cels, the animators would trace it once more with blue and black pencil leads to give the waves a sculptured look. To save time and money, the splashes were kept impressionistic. These techniques enabled Pinocchio to be one of the first animated films to have highly realistic effects animation. Ollie Johnston remarked "I think that's one of the finest things the studio's ever done, as Frank Thomas said, 'The water looks so real a person can drown in it, and they do.'" Release Home media Reception Box office Critical reception Live-action adaptation Trivia